All of your music, All the time

I am probably one of the last people on the planet without a smart phone; at least it feels that way. I have put off upgrading from a ‘dumb phone’ for a while, mostly because I don’t want to become one of those people who never put their phone down. However, with each and every advanced feature or convenient app that gets released, a smart phone is slowly climbing up my list of things I ‘need’.

Audiogalaxy is the app that pretty much opened my eyes to the freakish capabilities of smart phones. If you have never heard of it, Audiogalaxy is a free app for your phone that allows you to stream your entire music library from your own computer directly to your smart phone or to another computer. It also lets users create playlists as well as having an advanced feature called Genie that analyzes your music collection and listening history to create playlists automatically.

Have you ever been annoyed when you notice you have songs in your library just called Track 1 or Track 2 written by Unknown Artist? Audiogalaxy has a feature called Automagical Metadata repair which analyzes each audio file and acquires the correct info so you always know what song you are selecting.

Other apps exist, like Music Beta by Google or SubSonic. Music Beta allows for up to 20,000 songs to be uploaded and stored on Google’s servers for free, which is more practical and perhaps easier to set up for a user with limited technical knowledge. Subsonic is similar in features to Audiogalaxy, but requires about a $15 fee to register a server to be used by other devices. For a music dork like me with a collection well upwards of 100,000 songs, Audiogalaxy is perfect. The thought of being able to carry around thousands of gigabytes of music in my pocket for the cost of a data plan is enough motivation in itself to upgrade to a smart phone.

It is impossible to say what the state of smart phones will be in a couple years, but we can only assume that the growth of the market, the increase in research, and development of more advanced hardware will lead to limitless possibilities.

I hope you enjoyed the article. Now head over to blackboard and take the quiz!